Selects: Did Shakespeare really write all that stuff?

The question of Shakespeare's authorship has been around since at least the mid-1800s. Is there anything to it? In this classic episode, we dig in to this dense topic to find out.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's select,
I've chosen our twenty twenty two episode on Shakespeare and
whether he actually wrote all that stuff or if there
even was a Shakespeare. This episode is actually possibly my
favorite episode of all time because I knew nothing about
this and I learned a bunch of stuff, and I
found it really interesting and it was fun, really fun

(00:24):
to kind of turn around and explain.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
It to all of you.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
So I hope you enjoy this episode as much as
I always have every time I hear it about Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's
on the line. Jerry's here too, and we're about to
get jiggy with it about Shakespeare.

Speaker 4 (00:59):
Can I have this out of the gate? I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
So.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
The more we dug into this, you know, I was
an English major. We talked very briefly when I was
in college about Shakespeare's authorship, right, and I thought, Hey,
this would be a fun, little, semi easy episode. And
the more we dug into it, the more this onion unfolded.

(01:25):
It's onion, this bloomin Onion Unfolded Layer by Crispy Delicious Layer.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
For all of our Australian listeners, that's what we think
you guys eat every night every night.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
To the point where I was almost like, you know,
is this a two parters I mean, you could probably
do a ten part episode on this.

Speaker 4 (01:43):
Oh yeah, it's so dense.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
So I just want to caveat this for people that
know a lot about shakespeare authorship and saying this is
a pretty broad overview of the high points of his
authorship being questioned, because it is dense.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
Baby.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
It's the kind of thing that like extremely intelligent people
take on as their like lifelong hobby.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
It's like that we're.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
Like, we'll just bust it out in a few days,
it'll be fine.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, you know, like how some people are, like they
research World War II submarine warfare and know everything about it.
It's along the same lines, but it's even bigger. There's
so many people involved, and each side is like, you're
so naive to the other. And yes, it's true, like
we could turn this into a ten part series, but
I think we've got a handle on it enough to

(02:32):
present it. I feel in okay about it. And then
the other thing that sticks out for me, Chuck, is
this is one of the few things I've ever come
across like this that I am like truly agnostic about.
I do not have an opinion one way or the other.

Speaker 4 (02:46):
I don't know if I do either.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Actually, Like, it's not like I don't care, that's not
what I'm saying. Like, I genuinely can see both sides.
And the other thing about it is, the more you
dig into it, the more you realize, oh, neither side
actually has really good evidence to support their claim. It's
all just they have to get so granular that it
really quickly goes into the world of conspiracy theories pretty quickly.

Speaker 4 (03:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
I saw this video of a guy, this wonderful gentleman
who knows a lot about it, that said like, and
here's the golden bullet, which proves once and for all,
and he made his case, and I was like, no, No,
that didn't really prove it once and for all in
my opinion.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, for sure, because both sides do things like they
get into biographical readings where they're trying to find clues
within the text or you know, parallels to his life
for that kind of thing. And once that starts, it's like, okay,
you guys, you've just completely left the world of objectivity.

Speaker 4 (03:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
So what we're talking about, if you haven't guessed by now,
is this idea that has been around since at least
the mid eighteen hundreds, maybe before, about the question of
whether or not William Shakespeare was the sole author of
all of his works.

Speaker 4 (04:02):
And this is Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
From Stratford on the Avon, like that gentleman that we know,
became an actor and you know, writer, whether or not
he was the sole author, whether or not he was
affront for some other authors for some of the works.
Some people say he didn't write any of them. Some
people said it was various women who weren't allowed to

(04:25):
write things at the time. I saw sixty six candidates
over the years have been put forward.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I saw eighty.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Oh really, so there you have it, somewhere between sixty
six and eighty something of I know, we haven't.

Speaker 4 (04:41):
Been accused of writing any of Shakespeare's work.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Don't think so. I didn't come across that in my research.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
But it's an interesting literary I don't even know if
I want to call it a mystery, because some people
just say, like, no, I mean of course you wrote it,
and he was these outsized personal the most famous of
the famous are conspiracies are drawn to them. Elvis is
still alive, Marilyn Monroe was murdered. Like that happens when

(05:09):
you are, you know, one of the biggest icons in
your field quite often. So some people say this just
that's all that it is.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
In addition to that, there's a lack of biographical documentation
that he actually did write those plays. And I think
that that's also what allows for people to say, you know,
well do we really.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
Know or that he didn't write them, Like there's just
it was a time, you know, in the fifteen hundreds
where there were in sixteen hundreds where there just wasn't
a ton of great preserved information.

Speaker 4 (05:44):
And we're going to talk about a lot of that.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
So we do know that William Shakespeare did live. He
was from, like you said, Stratford on Avon. It was
at the time, about a two to three day journey
from London, about one hundred something miles I think. And
he definitely did live. He definitely did exist. That's not
a question because we do have documentary evidence that this
person live from fifteen sixty four to sixteen sixteen, about

(06:11):
fifty two years and depending on when you place his birthday,
maybe fifty two years on the nose, so we know
he existed. Again, what's that issue. What's being questioned whether
that man William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon, who went
on to become an actor, who went on to become
a producer, who worked with in the Globe theater, whether
he was the author of the plays we consider written

(06:34):
by Shakespeare. That's what's that question.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, So, like you said, he was a real dude.
He came from a family that was I mean I
kind of read it as a little bit middle class.
They certainly were not like upper class nobility types.

Speaker 4 (06:49):
His father was a glover. He wore well, I guess
he wore gloves too, but he made gloves.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Allow me to demonstrate, it'd be.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Pretty weird if he didn't. That guy won't even wear
his own gloves. But he produced these very very fine
gloves for well to do people.

Speaker 4 (07:07):
But he did achieve some.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
I guess, worked his way up the social chain a
little bit because eventually he would serve as sort of
like a mayor in Stratford. And again, while not nobility
like they were fairly well regarded as people.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Right, So we don't know for certain, but there's a
pretty good there's a much better chance than not that
because of his father's position in town, because they had
some money, Like you said, they were middle class, he
almost certainly would have been educated at the grammar school
at Stratford. So what most people think is that William

(07:46):
Shakespeare was educated until about the age of thirteen, and
he would have learned things like Latin, he would have
learned history, he would have learned some classic literature. He
definitely would have been exposed to stuff that whoever wrote
Shakespeare's plays would go on to expound on. So he
definitely was I can't say that. That's the thing, Like,

(08:09):
you really have to be careful what you say about this.
I know I was about to say, so he definitely
was educated. We don't know that he was. This is
all just a supposition, but it's a pretty good bat.
It's a good supposition that he actually was educated.

Speaker 4 (08:21):
Yeah, and all this, you know.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
The reason that's important is all of this kind of
comes back later, as some people say proof that he
may not have written this stuff, because like, how could
One of the main arguments used many times is how
could a kid who came from here have known about
these military exploits and the Elizabethan Court and all these

(08:43):
different languages and all this hyphalutin stuff that he wrote about.
So it's important to, you know, talk about his education.
And it seems like he was likely educated pretty well
until thirteen, which you know, I'm not even sure if
that's earlier or late as far as the time period
goes that. Do you know if that was like kind
of generally it for kids.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
It was it was in the middle because he could
have just as easily not.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Been educated at all, right, of course, but he.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Also didn't go on to Cambridge or Oxford to extend
his studies, so he was in there in the middle.
They think he was probably educated, not highly educated, but
also not you know, uneducated.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
That's that's the.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Key, and that if there was evidence he had not
gone to school, I think that the anti Shakespeare people
would have a real like mark in their favor. But
he has just enough education that you can make the
case like, no, like this guy, this guy learned about
this stuff already, and he could have known about it.
And you know, when you add imagination and natural talent

(09:45):
you come up with Shakespeare conceivably.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, he got married to Anne Hathaway. You know, go
ahead and insert an Hathaway joke there. You know she's
a real actor, right, sure.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, devil Waar's pro Princess Diaries. Yeah, big, I think
she was in Inception? No? No, was she Interstellar? Yes,
she did a stellar job in Interstellar.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Come on.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
They got married when he was quite a bit younger.
She was twenty six, he was eighteen. She was pregnant,
which is probably a little unusual for the time. They
had a daughter named Susannah, and then had twins, a
boy and a girl twin, and the boy named Hamnet,
not Hamlet but Hamnett.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, which apparently they've never turned up another use of
that name in at the time.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Proof he was eleven years old when he died, And
that kind of comes into play later on as well.
And then there's about a you know, from fifteen eighty
five to about fifteen ninety two, there's about a seven
year gap where we don't know a lot about what
was going on with Shakespeare, and then he pops up,

(11:01):
which a lot can happen in seven years. Again, not
trying to sway people, one way or the other. But
you can certainly learn a lot in seven years if
you have some big life experiences. But he pops up
in London in fifteen ninety two, again as far as
the record go goes, and you know, keep in mind,
a lot of this record before he was known in

(11:23):
his lifetime as an author, was you know, just kind
of not flimsy, but just not a lot of stuff
like various little lawsuits and mortgages and sort of banking
records and stuff like that, right.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, yeah, And also I mean, like that's about as
much documentation as you would be able to come up
with on most people. And you can make a case
that there's more documentation on Shakespeare than most other people
who weren't nobility right of his era. That's because there's
been so much scholarship and study and research into his

(11:57):
life that they've turned up as much as they can.
But what they've turned up only amounts to about five
hundred different pieces of documentation of one form or another.

Speaker 4 (12:09):
Right.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
So one of those pieces of documentation in early on
in London is a pamphlet written by generally believed to
be written by this guy named Robert Green. There were
some other people that could have possibly written it. But
it's called Green's groatsworth of wit. And there's a line
where he references Shakespeare in it in a contemporaneous fashion.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Is that right.

Speaker 4 (12:38):
Where he kind of takes a shot out of him.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
He says it talks about Shakespeare, says there's an upstart
crow in his own conceit the only shake scene in
a country, which kind of translates into he kind of
thinks he's the only Shakespeare like he thinks he's all that,
and it should be noted also as far as the
thievery that in Aesop's Fables, crows I would steal the

(13:03):
feathers of others. So the people in the I don't
want to say anti Shakespeare, but the people say that
he might not have written these things. Says this is
a big clue and saying that he might have stolen
some of these things. That's why he's referred to as
a crow by this other guy.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Yeah, but in that that quote, he says, the upstart
crow is beautified with our feathers, and he's a playwright.
So the pro Shakespeare people, you call them the pro
Stratford group, they suggest that what he's what Green is
talking about, is he's he's poking fun at a common

(13:39):
actor who is deigning to even attempt to write plays,
which you know, among playwrights is far more important than acting.
Anybody can act, but it really takes something to write
a play, at least that's what they thought at the time,
and that he's taking a shot at him for that.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Yeah, and we should point out that being an actor
back then and being a part of the theater was
not like it is today.

Speaker 4 (14:02):
It wasn't some revered position.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
It was sort of you know, body plays and common
people were into this kind of thing, so it wasn't
when he says he was just an actor.

Speaker 4 (14:14):
That's a pretty big diss right.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
So the last thing that we have, I guess the
last documentation, although there's other stuff that's been turned up.
They did archaeological expeditions on his house. I think his
house has been under ownership of a public trust since
like the nineteenth century, and they've carried out archaeological examinations

(14:38):
of it, and they found that he went back and
forth between London and Stratford, so they know stuff about
him like that. But as far as like documentation goes,
the last piece of documentation we have comes in sixteen sixteen,
which is his will that he wrote, and then a
few months later he died, and I guess the last

(14:59):
last piece of doc documentation is his tombstone, which in
and of itself is curious because his tombstone contains a
curse on it, but not his name.

Speaker 4 (15:08):
Yeah, is that the one with the quote.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, it's a curse. He's saying like, don't dig me
up or you're gonna be cursed.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, it's his good friend for Jesus sake, forbear to
dig the dust and closed here. Blessed be the man
who spares these stones, and cursed be he who moves
my bones. Some people point to that as a poor
writing and saying, well, Shakespeare was a great writer, would
have written this kind of shabby curse, And other people say, like,

(15:37):
who said Shakespeare even wrote that?

Speaker 4 (15:40):
Necessarily this is.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
A good instructive example of like kind of the back
and forth between those people, Right, this is terrible writing.
Who said Shakespeare wrote it? And then the anti Shakespeare
crew says, well, of course he wrote it, because who
else would just not think to put his name on
his own tombstone? And the other ones just put their
head in their hands, just start crying, and it just

(16:01):
goes downhill from there. But that's a really good example
of like the just kind of like people will jump
on any single thing that they possibly can and often
interpret it one way or the other. So one thing,
one single thing, provides evidence for both sides.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
It's that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (16:17):
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
Another thing that people point to is the fact that
of you know, we don't have a lot of like
letters and papers and things like that because his family
line ended in sixteen seventy. I think he had a granddaughter,
Elizabeth Barnard, that died without that bearing children, so most

(16:41):
of his stuff basically lost as far as family possessions
and things like that. People do point to the will
at times and say, well, in his will, you know,
he leaves certain things, but like there's never any mention
of any manuscripts. And again this is all like it's
a little weird, maybe, but none of this is proof.

(17:03):
And you know, through the personal records that we do
have in those five hundred references, like none of them
really reference him like manuscripts in him writing things.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Right, That's what's most compelling to me is that when
you put together the documentation about his life that we know.
It's clear he's involved in the theater, he's an actor.
We get that. That's that comes through loud and clear.
What doesn't come through isn't documented at all is him
as a writer. And that that thing about the will,
the fact that if you look at the wills and

(17:37):
bequeathments of other writers of the time, you can find
evidence that.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
They were writers.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
They like leave books to other people that there they
leave unfinished manuscripts that stay in the family for generations,
and it is very curious. His will is very curious.
But the fact that his personal stuff was just lost
to history because his granddaughter was the end of the

(18:04):
family line, that actually holds up because other great authors
of say the same major of any age. A lot
of the reason that their personal effects and papers are
still around is because their family home was passed down
from generation to generation to generation, and there was a
long enough period of time for the importance of that

(18:27):
writer to become clear. And so other people came in
and said, can we have your great great great grandfather's
personal effects. We want to put them in this museum.
There's enough time. There wasn't enough time. There was only
seventy years between the death of Shakespeare and the end
of his family line, and he didn't become widely popular
until the I think middle of the eighteenth century, so

(18:50):
he was kind of a victim of that. And both
of those to me provide really good evidence for why
there is a documentation of his writing.

Speaker 4 (19:00):
Yeah, absolutely in the will.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
And by the way, The Atlantic has a great, great,
pretty deep dive article as they do on this, which
provided a lot of the supplementary information that we got
by Elizabeth Winkler.

Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yeah, betweenty nineteen great read.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
One of the things that Winkler points out and other
people to point out on the will as well, is
like Shakespeare wrote a lot about music, and I think
there were three hundred musical terms, and all of his
plays mentioned of twenty six musical instruments. And like in
his will he didn't he didn't even have a loot
to pass down to anybody, and like you said, didn't

(19:40):
have books even like a library that he wanted to give.
And you know, again this is not proof necessary necessarily
of anything, but it's all of this stuff has added
up over the years too enough for people to arise
to like get suspicious about it.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
I think exactly, you want to take a break, a breather.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
I guess you could call.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
It, Yeah, let's take a let's take a breather, let's
take five. One thing that Ed who helped us put

(20:36):
this together mentions that I wanted to get your take
on it. I didn't really think it had a whole
lot to do with it. One way or the other
was all of the various misspellings of Shakespeare's name over
the years. He would sign it in different ways, he
would abbreviate it in different ways. There are documents with
I mean, it looks like fifteen different ways of spelling Shakespeare,

(20:59):
everything from shacks with an ex peer to spears and
something you would jab somebody with. It's misspelled all over
the place. And I just kind of took that, as
you know, people misspelled things a.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Lot back then.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
There weren't you know, there weren't necessarily records that you
could go look at very easily, so you might just
take a guess at how to spell a name, and
then it was on the record. And so I didn't
really think that factored in much, did you.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
And the impression I have is that all the different
spellings are easily explained away from just the era, like
you just said, and that the people who clamp onto
that are actually looking into them just to find like hidden.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Writing and codes too.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
Right, So I think like the different spellings of the
names is it's about Yeah, it's about as big a
boondoggle as you're gonna find in the in the Shakespeare
authorship argument, I think.

Speaker 4 (21:49):
All right, so we'll cast that aside.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
Well, hold on, before we do, I want to point
out my favorite abbreviation.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Which one I think I let me look, I bet
you I know which one, But.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Go, okay, put it, put it back in the deck.

Speaker 4 (22:01):
Yeah, it's back in the deck.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Okay, it is Wilm shack p.

Speaker 4 (22:06):
Yeah, that's a lot.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
That's the one.

Speaker 4 (22:08):
It stands out pretty blatantly. Sahakp.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
I love it.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
Sheck, Hello, Wilm sheck.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
It's not a really good hotel check in name, but
it's still worth mentioning.

Speaker 4 (22:19):
I think that's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
So, like we mentioned, sort of what's at the root
of a lot of these theories is what ed I
think rightly calls elitism, which is, how could this guy
even you know, educated up to thirteen, how could he
have known about all this stuff? How could he have
known about military exploits? And you know, if you read

(22:42):
Shakespeare's plays, which if you're an English major, you have
to read a lot of them, there's a lot going
on in these plays about a lot of different stuff.
He didn't write about just kind of one kind of thing.
So it implies like a really deep breadth of knowledge
about a lot of things.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
And not just different things as it relates to England,
different things, as it relates to entirely different lands. Like
think about where a lot of his stuff takes places
in Italy, and as far as anyone knows, Shakespeare didn't
go to Italy. Although remember there's that lost year eight
year period they call him the Lost Years. It's entirely
possible he went to Italy during that time. It's also

(23:21):
just as possible that he didn't go to Italy during
that time. We just don't know. But that is something
that really stands out. And yes, there is a tremendous
amount of elitism and classicism among some of the anti
Shakespeare group, but I think that that is I think
that dismisses a lot of their points out of hand.
And they do have some really good points. They're not

(23:43):
just cranks and crack pots, Like they have some pretty
good evidence. You can make a case at least as
good to evidence that as the pro Shakespeare people. But
the upshot of it is really kind of a compliment.
They're saying, these plays are so good. Yeah, that Shakespeare's
arguably the greatest writer who ever lived. He has such

(24:07):
a crazy imagination, he's so funny, he has such an
extensive vocabulary, such an amazing grasp of the human condition.
Could it really all have been written by this man
from at the time the country, who was educated up
to thirteen, who came from the middle class, who may
or may not have ever traveled out of England? How
is that even possible? Are people born that gifted? That's

(24:31):
ultimately if you want to go beyond the classicism in
the elite totally. That's really what their argument boils down to.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah, I agree, And if you don't know a lot
of Shakespeare, have never really read a lot yourself, and
you think like you're sort of in that camp, like
I mean, this is kind of overrated, like this guy, No,
these plays are brilliant and there's a reason why they
still make contemporary movies based on Shakespeare's plays or inspired

(25:00):
by Shakespeare's plays. It's because they were all genuinely brilliant.
It was great, great stuff. And what you need is
a really good teacher to kind of walk you through
it because it's it's tough to read. And we had
we had some good ones at Georgia, at University of Georgia.

Speaker 4 (25:16):
I had one.

Speaker 3 (25:16):
I can't remember his name. God, I can picture him
in my head. He was so great. Probably yeah someone No,
it was Wilmi shack Be shack Bee.

Speaker 4 (25:29):
Oh, I wish I could remember his name.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
I bet you someone will write in in the mid
nineties through the great play Harpsichord.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Oh well, no, I had a classics professor who played
a harpsichord.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Yeah, this was you know, you had to take Shakespeare
one and two. Those were the only required English classes
as a as an English major, so that kind of
shows the importance. But what he did was he saddus
down and we read the plays out loud in class,
and after every you know, short bit, he would say, well,
here's what's going on, and here's what he's saying.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yes, man, you were very lucky.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, and once once you hear that and you're like, oh,
these are very contemporary stories, and that's why they still
carry such weight today is because they were brilliant stories,
but stories that were very relatable even now. It's not
high falutin stuff, it's just it was written at a
time where it seems that way.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, because we don't really speak in you know,
Renaissance English anymore, so it seems it might as well
be Greek to us. But yeah, it was intended for
common audiences, like the average person would laugh or cry
at those at those plays. And I think also it
like really kind of supports your point that four hundred
years later, those plays can still make people today laugh

(26:44):
and cry like they still hold up. I guess what
you're saying. And have you ever heard of Sister Wendy. No,
she is, she's a nun. I don't believe she's still
with us. And I think in the nineties she made
this series of videos where she just went around to
music around the world and explained paintings to you in

(27:04):
a way that I would love to find a sister
Wendy of Shakespeare. I'm sure there's somebody out there, but
you could do a lot worse of killing several hours
watching Sister Wendy explain paintings because she was she had
like a natural gift at just not only understanding what
she was looking at, but explaining it really understandably.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
I love that, and I think in Sister Wendy's case
and my professor Shackby, it's it.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
It comes from a place of.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
They have such great admiration and they want us, They
really want people to understand this stuff. You might ordinarily
go like, well, I don't get it. I don't get
paintings like this, or I don't get plays like this.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
I art.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
So should we get in speaking of art?

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Great segue, should we get into this mess of the
bust of Shakespeare?

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (27:53):
I mean it's another It's very much like his tombstone,
where people are like it means this, No, it means that,
you know.

Speaker 4 (28:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
So there's a bust an effigy of Shakespeare inside the
church there in Stratford. And there's been a lot of
controversy over this thing because part of it is not
necessarily like was he the author, although it does play
into that, but sort of like what did he look like?
And how do we know that's what he looked like?
Like we've all seen the picture and there's like this

(28:22):
one painting and this one bust, and that's kind of
where everything comes from. And some people say this was
done after he was dead, like, we really don't know
that that's what he looked like. I think just a
couple of years ago, this professor and expert made a
pretty good case that beyond most reasonable doubt that it

(28:44):
was actually done. I think she said it was highly likely.
Professor Orlan said it's highly likely that it was done
while he was alive, and that he commissioned it because
she thinks she knows who did the bust, and that
that person lived near him and was irregular at the
globe and.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
Kind of put all these clues together.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
But other people, some people say it was his dad
and not him because of this whole sack of grain argument.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah, so there there was an etching that was made
of the bust within some period of time after the
bust was erected, but before it was altered. So the
bus has definitely been altered. And it looks like one
way you can interpret this, this thing at the bottom,
this puffy things that's at the hands of the bust,

(29:32):
the effigy as a sack of grain. I don't know
if it were a sack of green, why anyone would
ever present it in that position.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
And so right, so what the anti Shakespeare, anti Stratford
people are saying is like, yeah, it's his dad, it's
it's not him, or if it is Shakespeare, he was
known for his grain carrying skills, not his writing skills.
And the pro strap for people are like, don't be ridiculou.
This is obviously a pillow, and at some point somebody

(30:03):
did revise the bus, so it is unequivocally a pillow,
like there's just no way to mistake it. And it's
not so much a pillow as it is like a
handrest for him to write on, because he's got a
piece of paper on it and a quill in his
other hand. But the anti Shakespeare people jump on that
and say, like, see it was altered to fit this

(30:23):
to cover up this conspiracy later.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
On, Yeah, exactly, And that quill has been stolen and
replaced I think so many times over the years that
now I don't know if it currently has the quill
or if it has the quill, and it's now behind glass.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
Oh, that could that's a good way to get around
as sure.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
I'm not really sure, but you know, that became a
you know, obviously it's something you could just snatch of
his hand, and you've got Shakespeare's quill on your on
your door.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Speaking of being snatched.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Apparently that curse on his tombston didn't work because they
did a scan of it on the four hundred thing
versary of his death and found that at least his
skull was missing, if not all of his remains. Oh
really yeah, and that interesting. So somebody out there has
Shakespeare's skull in their personal collection.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
It's probably Rosenkrantz or Guildenstern. I like, great Shakespeare joke.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
That's good.

Speaker 4 (31:20):
There's some people out there that were, like, nailed it.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Good.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Another thing, as far as evidence goes, is the first folio,
which is I think it was the first collection that
they put in print of all of Shakespeare's plays, including
eighteen that had never been in print before.

Speaker 4 (31:40):
And there was a I guess was it?

Speaker 3 (31:42):
A forward written by a guy named Ben Johnson who
was a rival of Shakespeare's. He was kind of known
as a jealous, sort of argumentative guy. But he calls
Shakespeare the Swan of Avon and is sort of very
laudatory in this forward, but I think you found stuff
later on where he was kind of like, m I

(32:06):
had my fingers cross the whole.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Time kind of yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
So the pro Stratford people who believe Shakespeare or Shakespeare say, look, man,
this guy was known as a rival, a friendly rival,
but a real rival, really critical, like, had biting criticism
and sense of humor, and also was not one to
just be like.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
To just bow to nobility or privilege or wealth or status.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
Right, So if this guy is saying that Shakespeare the
Swan of Avon, which places this man at Stratford on Avon,
because Ben Johnson is calling him that, that proves that
Shakespeare was Shakespeare. The anti Shakespeare camp says, like you said,
Ben Johnson at his fingers crossed the whole time, and
that really what he was doing was providing cover for

(32:54):
this larger, essentially conspiracy of people who actually were Shakespeare,
was blending his renown to it.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Neither one really makes sense.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
I mean, unless Ben Johnson had like a complete change
of heart, it just doesn't quite add up. But then
also the idea that he would provide that cover for
a group of noble people and seems unlikely as well too.

Speaker 4 (33:22):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
One of the first public doubters in the eighteen hundreds
was a woman named Delia Bacon, no relation to Francis Bacon,
although you may think so, because one person that Delia
Bacon put forward as one of the authors was Francis Bacon.

(33:44):
Delia Bacon was an American, was a writer, had a
sort of a long life before she got into kind
of hating Shakespeare, Yeah, hating him, like really didn't like
Shakespeare and really wanted to prove that he was not
the author. And her idea was that it was Francis Bacon,

(34:06):
Walter Raleigh, and I think maybe some other people too,
who were these very well regarded people of you know,
philosophy and politics and science, who would not have been
allowed to put forth these plays. And what these plays,
what they really were, were not even meant for entertainment
or for the stage. They were meant to be sort

(34:27):
of biting criticisms of all kinds of various things that
these gentlemen could not put their name on.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, so there's yeah, either they couldn't put their name
on it because they would be executed as basically treason
as to the crown, because they were, you know, putting
forth the idea of social reform and you know, women's
rights and all sorts of stuff, taking potshots at the nobility.
Or there's another theory called the stigma of print that

(34:55):
was introduced in I think the eighteen seventies, and that
was that they just just out of noble nobility nobless,
I guess they wouldn't deign to have their stuff published.
It would erode their social reputation, even accepting the idea
that they would be beheaded for treason. So there are

(35:16):
a couple of reasons that somebody like Francis Bacon would
have to cover up his identity if he were actually Shakespeare.
And that same stigma of print and political cover argument
gets extended to other people beyond Bacon too.

Speaker 3 (35:32):
Yeah, and that, you know, it makes a little bit
of sense. As far as Delia Bacon, she was able
to talk Ralph Waldo Emerson into basically kind of buying
her story and he arranged for her sponsorship basically to
go to England to kind of research this. Apparently in
England she was kind of on record saying that she

(35:54):
didn't research history books or records and things like that.
She believed that the the proof was sort of in
the plays themselves, yeah, and in the in the text basically,
like with these clues. Apparently, she used to go to
Shakespeare's tomb a lot and and kind of just you know,
hang out there and like try to convince the I

(36:15):
guess the tomb keeper or whoever you know takes care
of the cemetery, the crypt keeper.

Speaker 4 (36:19):
Yeah, the crypt keeper.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
I didn't want to say it to be let in,
and like almost got in at one point apparently, but
I think she got sick and couldn't. And but she
thought that the you know, the deep secret was within
that tomb.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Yeah, she kind of kicked off the nuttier camp of
the questioning of of Shakespeare. In addition to kicking off
the whole thing. She she put like kind of a
nutty sheen to it, like the idea that you could
get your answers just from reading the plays, right, the
clues were in there. The thing is is Francis Bacon

(36:54):
was known to amuse himself by including you know, hidden
codes and messages in his writings. So if it was
Francis Bacon, that's not that much of a stretch, and
supposedly Mark Twain and some friends did actually turn up.
If you read the first folio, there is I guess
some series of lines that spell out Francisco BACONO.

Speaker 4 (37:20):
It's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
I mean, here's the thing, though, Francis Bacon wrote a
lot about a lot of stuff, but not a lot
of fiction and pros or didn't he write no evidence
that he ever wrote any kind of plays, did he?

Speaker 4 (37:35):
Right?

Speaker 2 (37:36):
There was this other thing that kind of came along.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
So Delia Bacon is widely regarded as the person who
kicked off that it was Shakespeare Shakespeare idea, But supposedly
there was a person who came before her, James Wilmot,
who in seventeen eighty one sat down to write a
biography of Shakespeare and did all the research in London
and Stratford, on ava on and was astonished by the

(38:04):
lack of documentation that Shakespeare had written those plays and
started to suspect it and that he kicked it off.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
The thing is, the.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
Anti Shakespeare side has been accused of making those documents up,
of forging those documents to support Delia Bacon's Francis Bacon theory.
Oh interesting, Yeah, so they weren't discovered until nineteen thirty one,
which is pretty convenient, and it's entirely possible that they
were just forged.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
All right, should we take another break here? Yeah's all right,
we'll take another break. We'll talk a little bit more
about whether Shakespeare wrote that stuff.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
So one more thing about Delia Bacon before we wrap
it up. Like you said, she was a good writer,
and her exhaustive examination of the texts of Shakespeare's plays
resulted in a six hundred and twenty page book, The
Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, and she's often

(39:32):
credited with basically prefiguring, if not kicking off, the idea
of literary criticism of close readings of stuff to find
other meanings. And she was doing it to expose noble
people as Shakespeare.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
But she was really good at.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
It, and people said, well, hey, maybe we should do
this for other stuff too.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
Yeah, and like ironically, because she kind of I mean,
you know, the various tawdry accounts say she was driven
to madness. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but
it did seem like it pretty much consumed her in
the latter stages of her life and that her family
was kind of embarrassed and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
Right, So Francis Bacon was not the only person put
forth and there's probably, as far as like believers go,
somebody who at least rivals, if not eclipses him, and
that would be the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de
Vere Right.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
Yeah, I mean there's a whole there's a whole camp
and a whole other and you know, we can't get
into this too too much in detail, but there's a
whole movement that says out of the eighty people like
we really think it was the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah, it's called the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship, and
there is, you.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Know, some stuff to it.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
He was a poet, which Ed points out that's so
much for the stigma of print, and that also you
can compare his poetry and in like some specific works
of poetry to some of Shakespeare's poetry and see some
real comparisons. But as far as I can tell that

(41:15):
the questions are the similarities and there, if I'm not mistaken,
like and that to me, it was the sixth Earl
of Derby who has a little more, a little more
to offer.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
Oh really, Oh no, it was about Derby.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
There was one other thing. So Derby has his own group,
the Derbyites.

Speaker 4 (41:36):
Right, this is what I mean. It's an onion. It's
a bloomin onion.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
So there was one other thing about Devere that is
pretty suspicious. There were two narrative poems that Shakespeare dedicated
to a man who was raised in the same household
as Devere. And from what anybody could tell, there's no
reason Shakespeare would know this person, and why would Shakespeare
dedicate to poems.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
So this this.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
Nobleman he didn't know, but Devere certainly knew him. He
was he was basically raised alongside him like a brother.
So that, along with the biographical reading, the close reading
looking for parallels between Devere's life and Shakespeare's plays, are
what kind of back up the Oxfordian.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Theories interesting because Christopher Marlowe is another one who was
a contemporary and friend of Shakespeare's, and they collaborated and
they influenced one another, and this the details around Marlowe's
death are hinky enough to where some people thought or
at least that you know, the conspiracy is that is

(42:41):
that he faked his death because he was going to
going to be executed by the crown and continued to
write and then used his friend Billy Shakespeare as affront
to continue to get those plays out. I'm not really
sure about this because I don't know that's that's just

(43:01):
a little far fetched.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
If you ask me, well, yeah, if and if you're
if you're supposing that Marlow faked his death in order
to continue writing, you've now got a conspiracy theory wrapped
in a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 4 (43:14):
Yeah, maybe that's what.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Yeah, but it's interesting because you know, Marlow is a
pretty interesting dude in himself. Supposedly he may have been
a secret agent for the crown.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
He was an.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Atheist, he was his own playwright. People loved him as
a playwright at the time, but he was no Shakespeare.
Like literally, he's probably the flimsiest person you could attribute
Shakespeare's writings to because Marlow was gloomy and super atheist
and he was. His plays just didn't have that same

(43:47):
kind of humanism and funniness that Shakespeare's plays had. And also,
why wouldn't Marlow just write these plays under his own name?
He had no reason to write these plays under different names.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
There have been people that put forth the idea that
there were several different women that might have been the
real authors, because women were not allowed to write plays
at the time. Eighty percent of the plays written during
this time were anonymous and no author was listed, and
a lot of people said, hey, a lot of these
were written by women and they just couldn't put their

(44:22):
name on it. Many of Shakespeare's plays and ideas are
very progressive. It's kind of a kind of a I
don't know about flimsy, but it kind of demeans Shakespeare
a bit to say that, like, well, it had to
be a woman because they were so progressive about women
like taking a stand, when in fact Shakespeare seemingly very

(44:46):
much thought that way himself, right, Like, how.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Could a man write women like this?

Speaker 3 (44:50):
Come on, Yeah, there's a woman named Mary Sidmund Herbert
who has a whole foundation that's trying to prove that
she wrote. Kind of the word of the Internet happened
about seven years ago. When you get these memes that
are just full of false stuff and then everyone starts
spreading them around. Oh yeah, there was a meme in

(45:12):
twenty fifteen went all over social media that just had
the picture of this black woman and said, this is
Amelia Bassano. She really wrote Shakespeare's stuff. She was not
allowed to be a published author because she was a
black woman at a time where she was suppressed and
all this stuff. None of this stuff was true. First

(45:32):
of all, she was maybe Moroccan. She was definitely not
of African descent.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Oh. I saw she was Venetian.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
I saw that she was Moroccan and had some Italian
in her, so that okay, yeah, it makes a little sense.
But she was definitely not of African descent. She was
a published author, so the whole notion that she wasn't
allowed to publish things wasn't right. She was kind of
a well known poet.

Speaker 4 (45:57):
I think at the time.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
So this kind of I think gets passed along the
internet and then you know, half the people that see
had to say, oh, well, look at that Shakespeare was
all written by this lady back then.

Speaker 4 (46:09):
Yeah, problem solved, And that's just not how it works.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
One of the other things I saw that, and I
think the people who are like Shakespeare is a woman
are like, well, okay, if we're starting to question Shakespeare's authorship,
we can't ignore this whole group of people who had
every reason to hide their identity as authors of these
plays because they were women and they weren't for sure
to do this kind of stuff. So there was a

(46:33):
critic who in fifteen ninety three wrote of a who
praised a gentle woman who was writing some amazing plays
and sonnets. And this was the year after Shakespeare pops
back up after his lost years and when he was
starting to write. But that the critics said he didn't
want to reveal who it was because he didn't want
to basically get her in trouble. So that's what some

(46:55):
other people kind of look at and say, See, Shakespeare.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Was a woman.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
Well, I mean, I think think, I think this theory
makes a lot more sense than a lot of the others.
You know, just by this year fact that women would
not have been allowed to So maybe Shakespeare was progressive
and decided to be affront for these great works.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
But it reveals a point about being an anti Shakespeare
anti I guess Stratford person is you have to part
of is you have to explain why somebody would want
to fake authorship, would want to hide behind Shakespeare's name.

Speaker 4 (47:31):
Yeah, what do you call that a motive.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Yeah, you got means, motive, and opportunity. You put those
three together, you got your Shakespeare.

Speaker 4 (47:42):
Well that's what I mean about the maybe women wrote them.
I mean there was definite motive.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
There, right exactly. So there was one other thing that happened.
I mean a lot of stuff happened over the course
of this hundred almost two hundred years now of questioning
Shakespeare's authorship. Back in nineteen eighty seven, Ox forty and
Charlton Augburn got the at least three sitting Supreme Court

(48:07):
justices John Paul Stevens, William Brennan and Harry Blackman to
hold a mock trial to determine if Shakespeare actually was
the author of Shakespeare's plays, and they did on Sea Span.
They had they held like a trial and heard the evidence,
and Shakespeare had his own attorney arguing for him, and
it was pretty interesting. But they it went two to one,

(48:30):
I think, in favor of Shakespeare from Stratford as the author.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
But they did like real research and stuff. It wasn't
just like a you know, yeah stunt.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
No, so the Supreme Court justices were kind of taking
its tongue in cheek. But I got the impression that
Charlton Augburn was like, yes, finally going to prove it
definitively one way or another, and it didn't even fall
in his favor. Interesting, Yeah, it is interesting what people
did in the eighties on Sea Span.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
I got a few more little things here from that
Atlantic article that point to his authorship as being genuine.
One is that he had a narrative poem called Venus
and Adonis that was a very popular poem at the
time that was put in print, and it was printed
by a gentleman named Richard Field, who apparently went to

(49:20):
school with him at Stratford.

Speaker 4 (49:22):
So that's a pretty good little hint.

Speaker 3 (49:26):
He was written about at the time, so it's not
like he was never known until his death and then
all of a sudden became super popular, Like he died
a rich man and was written about by literary critics
at the time and entertainment and play critics. So there
were contemporaneous criticisms of his writing while he was still living,

(49:50):
which is a pretty, you know, pretty big clue that
he probably wrote this stuff, although it is not proof.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
No, because those people could be they went and saw
a play by Shakes, They doesn't mean that they met
Shakespeare and talked to Shakespeare about the authorship of the place.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
And leaned over his shoulder while he wrote it proof.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
The other last thing that I saw in that Atlantic
article this is the one or actually this.

Speaker 4 (50:13):
Was a this was the golden bullet from that video?
Was it okay?

Speaker 1 (50:18):
Was?

Speaker 3 (50:19):
Shakespeare was apparently concerned that his dad's reputation sort of
in the family's reputation, suffered later in life because of
financial problems that his dad had, and he really wanted
to kind of restore their name and get a coat
of arms made, which is you could you know, it's
like you could be a true gentleman if you had
a coat of arms. And apparently it's a really long process.

(50:41):
They don't just hand him out to anybody. You got
to have a certain level of achievement to get a
coat of arms. So he went through this big, long
process and had he went on Barry Linden on there,
Oh man, what a movie. He had a couple of
different men in the Harold's office who defended Shakespeare's right
to have a coat of arms because other people were saying,

(51:02):
who is this guy? Even like he came from not
much and he shouldn't have a coat of arms. And
one of the guys who defended him was a man
named William Camden, who this guy in the video referred
to as.

Speaker 4 (51:13):
One of the most learned men in all of England.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
He was actually Ben Johnson's schoolmaster and apparently just knew
everything happening on the literary scene inside and out. And
in one of his books he was called the Remains
of a Greater History. He talks about all the great
writers of the time and he lists William Shakespeare of
Avon in that book.

Speaker 4 (51:37):
So he said, that's the golden bullet again. If it's
just a front, it's still no real proof of authorship.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
No it's not. I mean like this guy could just
be playing along, lending his.

Speaker 4 (51:50):
Or didn't notable weight.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Yeah, that's another one too.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Like that's the thing, like the anti Stratfordians have caused
the pros at Fordian's to actually defend their position, and
in doing so it's kind of revealed that both of
them are kind of on shaky ground. It's almost just
a matter of belief. Do you want to believe that
one man was that brilliant and that talented and gifted,

(52:16):
or do you can. You just not believe that. It
just doesn't make any sense to you. So it was
a cabal of noble people who were trying to advance
political reform and hiding behind William Shakespeare, paying them off
with maybe family crests and money and fame right to
let them use his name as their you know, the playwright.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Yeah. They also say, like where he was from. There
was some regional slang that was very specific to where
he was from that was used. There was in Taming
of the Shrew he mentions these Latin phrases that are
in specifically from a Latin book that apparently was known
to have been used at his school, at his grammar

(52:58):
school in Stratford. So again there's all these little hints
and clues. All of it kind of gave me a headache, right,
and I was like, can we just like love these plays?

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Right?

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Exactly? That's exactly right. It's the ultimate point. Let's just
love the plays.

Speaker 4 (53:15):
People take it serious about this though, Yeah, they definitely do.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
I mean it's pretty interesting and I mean I get
it kind of fun to watch from the outside too. Yeah,
you got anything else?

Speaker 4 (53:25):
No, we could go on all day, but totally we'd
never get anywhere.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
There's like ten things I'm leaving on the table, so
we just got to keep moving on, right, all right,
Let's keep on keeping on, Chuck. If you want to
know more about Shakespeare and authorship, there is a giant,
gaping rabbit hole. You can jump down on the internet
and say cionara to.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
All of your other pursuits.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
And since I said cyonara, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
I'm gonna call this just came in over the wire.
I thought it was kind of funny from our friends.
Steven in Kagoshima, Japan, in about eating about eating squid,
says love the show fellas reason not to be so
touchy though about eating squid, they are child murdering sea vermin,

(54:13):
he said. The reason squid die after they mate is
a survival adaptation, because if not, they would eat the
eggs and newly hatched squid from themselves and other squid
in the spawning areas. Squidly diddley is an infanticidal maniac
and should be cooked and eaten, albeit sustainably, of course.

Speaker 4 (54:37):
So that's the argument, is that.

Speaker 3 (54:39):
These squids deserve to be eaten because they would be
eating themselves if not for this adaptation. So he also says,
tell Josh not to eat uncooked squid.

Speaker 4 (54:49):
That is not great.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
All right, and kind regards from Stephen in Kagoshima, Japan,
a squid haven and a squid ink pasta destination.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
Stephen, that was a really great eye opening email. I
may have seen the light. I'm not sure yet. I'll
have to get back to you. Okay, okay, thank you
for responding to that, Stephen. Sure, if you want to
be like Steven and get in touch with us and
send us a potentially eye opening email, you.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Can do that.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 4 (55:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.